> The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.
The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.
I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.
The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent, for the good of the nation. Patents were always intended for the overall wellbeing of the nation. That's not to say that is what has always been achieved by the patent system, but it's not some sort of conspiracy. If anything, in history, they were always OSTENSIBLY for good, but perhaps ACTUALLY bad. So I find your statement to be A) historically and factually inaccurate B) literally incorrect given your usage of ostensibly.
> The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent
No it doesn't, it grants them the power but it doesn't specify they have to do it.
“The Congress shall have Power To…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries….”
There is a big difference between having a power and being forced to use it.
I don't think that's a great reading of congress' enumerated powers. The shall refers to the powers being powers that can be used when appropriate, to achieve the intended goal of the power. Must language, here, would imply a constant duty to use each power.
My reading is that Congress has an OBLIGATION to promote the arts and sciences, and has the power to use copyright and patent law to achieve those goals as congress sees fit.
By your very logic, does that mean the second enumerated power "2. To borrow money on the credit of the United States;" means that we are also obligated to be in debt? Would it be unconstitutional to pay down the debt of the nation?
Additionally, even if Congress had an obligation to grant intellectual property rights, couldn't they simply grant patents for a term of 24 hours? or 15 seconds?
From what I've read (c.f. Clinton v. City of New York 1998), Congress can decline to use a power, but it cannot grant that power to another branch of government.
IANAL, but the fact that it says nothing about an obligation (I don't even believe it's implied, but I'm not a historical legal scholar) leads me to believe you're inserting your own bias.
One thought would be, if there was no duty implied in the specific enumeration of this power and it's implied goal, then why wouldn't it just be part of the necessary and proper clause?
If you think that you probably shouldn't deal with a lot of statutes. For what it's worth, despite your contentions, I don't at all believe it is confusing. But I'm a litigator and I went to law school.
If you think the necessary and proper clause can be read to authorize patents, you probably have a very different idea of how to interpret the constitution than the drafters of the constitution.
Agree with this. In administrative law (the principles of which apply here) certain words have technical interpretations that are very different from the colloquial meaning. "Shall" is one of those words - and I too would interpret this as an obligation.
But it doesn't say that "Congress shall promote the progress..." it says "Congress shall have the power to promote the progress..."
If the framers wanted to require that Congress do this stuff, why insert "have the power to" unnecessarily? There's no need for that phrase.
As another point against this being an obligation, if you look at the list of enumerated powers[0], you'll see some that are clearly not obligations. Congress doesn't have to borrow money. They don't have to maintain a navy. They didn't have to establish post offices. They didn't have to create a federal court system. (Granted, it makes a lot of sense for them to do many of these things, but it feels wrong to think that they're required to.)
This area of law is very tricky. As I've stated above, the technical (i.e., legal) interpretation can be quite different from how a layperson would understand the same words.
The basic idea here is that an authority (e.g., Congress) that has been given a specific power (e.g., declaring war) is obligated to exercise that power where appropriate.
Do note the specific phrasing above: if there is a situation in which exercising that power is the appropriate course of action, then that power must be exercised. The authority cannot choose not to exercise the power in such a situation.
So, Congress doesn't have to declare war for the sake of declaring war. However, if there is an existential military threat to the USA (e.g., aggression by the Japanese Empire in WW2) you could argue that Congress is obligated to declare war, as this would be an appropriate situation to exercise that power.
Of course, the above explanation is very simplistic. There can be specific wordings that clarify how much discretion that authority has; there may be case law pertinent to that area; and whether a given situation mandates "appropriate" exercise of a given power is never a black-and-white decision.
That cuts both ways, though. It would be pretty easy to argue that it is not the "appropriate course of action" to implement the copyright or patent system in the way we have, and that, indeed, the "appropriate course of action" is to have minimal -- or even no -- protections.
That's not the reading I'm arguing for. The reading I'm arguing for is that it requires Congress to declare war when it is appropriate for Congress to do so
The Framers were skeptical of enabling government to give out patent and copyright monopoly grants. Jefferson wrote:
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
It is notable that patent and copyright are not natural rights. At no time was it assumed that people have such rights, nor that government, without explicit authorization could grant such limited term monopolies. Calling these monopolies "good" is definitely not uncontested, nor was it ever.
It's true some of the founders were skeptical, I never said otherwise and I never said it was "uncontested. What I said was that it's inclusion in the Constitution is for a clear reason, whether or not the reasoning is valid is a different debate.
As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences.
I guess you think that the promotion of the progress of arts and sciences is not inherently a GOOD thing, but I'd disagree and I think the implied reasoning behind it's inclusion is entirely self-evident.
Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago?
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
Thus it is very reasonable to ask: Is the behavior we see from IBM in this news story promoting the progress of "science" and/or "useful arts"? Is the behavior of industry overall with respect to these tools doing more good or more harm?
It seems like you don't fundamentally get the point...
The intent of the patent systems != what the patent system achieves
What I described to you, that you disagreed with was the intent of the patent system. If you want to debate what the patent system achieves, it's a much more complicated question.
It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.
You cut out the very next sentence which describes the element that I am claiming is unsubstantiated.
Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.
Unfortunately this clause was specifically litigated and we lost.
More specifically, can Congress achieve unlimited terms with regular copyright extensions to existing copyright? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft ruled that they can. However their next attempt to extend has so far failed.
We will find out in 2024 whether they get it together, or whether Mickey Mouse enters the public domain after all...like it should have done in 1984. (That was the maximum that could have been expected when Steamboat Willie was released.)
I still believe that's wrong, but a re-do now would be pointless. I doubt anyone within the next few decades will put someone for the people, rather than for the rich people and corporations, on the supreme court. There's a lot of corruption (money/influence) everywhere that needs to be cleaned up first.
"Framers" is more correct. Not all the Founding Fathers participated in authoring the constitution.
Secondly, an explicit reason implies a condition: Is current patent law actually fit for the stated purpose?
Lastly, another comment here refers to the language of "amendments," presumably the Bill of Rights. The Copyright Clause is a clause, not an amendment, and not part of the BoR.
The Framers also actively supported and participated in the slavery trade, believing it was perfectly reasonable and rational to own people as property.
The intellectual property system may have been intended as a force for good. However, it's gotten to the point where everyone knows how to abuse the system and get away with it. There is no reason for anyone to recognize it as a legitimate.
Companies file deliberately vague all-encompassing patents that are very hard to understand and pretty much useless for the purpose of educating the public and advancing the state of the art. Patents are merely weapons to be used against competitors. Companies file patents despite the existence of prior art and not only are they granted by the patent office but they're also allowed to stand uncontested due to the prohibitively expensive nature of patent litigation.
Disney and its copyright industry friends lobbied the government and successfully cheated the public out of its public domain rights by extending the duration of copyright to ludicrous lengths. If that's not criminal conspiracy, I don't know what is. YouTube and the copyright industry cheat people out of their fair use rights every single day.
It's weird that we expect the law to be perfect yet we don't expect that of other things. I think you make a lot of valid points. However, I think you miss the forest for the trees. The point is, if you don't like this system, another one would need to be put in its stead. Short of any ideas how that would work, I'm skeptical of the claim that these laws are illegitimate. I guess you don't think we should respect criminal law either? Should we not put any white collar criminals away at all because so many go free? It's an absurd argument that you are making, ultimately.
You can of course have any opinion you want, but at least present the actual rational for why patents exist. Let me attempt to state it, whether you agree with it or not.
A company may invent a mechanism or process which is better for its intended use than what came before. Sometimes it takes a lot of money and time and it doesn't always work. In the case of a mechanism, once it is sold, competitors could take it apart and reap the benefits without having expended the money and effort to create something new. If patents were killed off, it would discourage people and companies from making those investments. It has varied over the centuries, but currently a patent gives a 20 year time limited "monopoly" on the thing invented.
In the case of a process (vs a mechanism), without patents, a company is highly motivated to keep the process a trade secret. Even with patents a company may prefer to take that route. What do patents offer here? In exchange for disclosing the process, the company is granted that monopoly. In theory disclosing the process will spur the next round of improvements and help the system.
The problem isn't necessarily patents, but the process. Patent examiners are not paid all that well and literally have minutes to research and approve or deny a patent. They need to crank through multiple patent applications a day. And companies abuse the system. Secondly, the practice in patent law is to write the patents in such a way as to disclose as little as possible and claim as much as possible using obtuse language. If you read really old patents an ordinary person could understand most of them. Today I can read a patent in a domain I'm expert in and it is very hard to follow.
There should be some penalty for filing obvious patents, and part of the penalty would be to pay for for more patent examiners, and to pay the legal costs of the challenging party.
The first US patent was for a method of making potash, for fertilizer.
The early US loom patents are particularly ironic as they were “stolen” from the British design rather than actually invented, in violation of British law. The same thing applied to a whole bunch of other early technologies - the patents existed to encourage stealing other peoples ideas and hard work then claiming it as your own.
If patents had a requirement that they must be licensed under "reasonable" terms (i.e. if brought to court you can argue that the license was designed to price out or discourage competitors) then I'm totally in support of them since it's supposed to be a reward for sharing your design with the world rather than keeping it a trade secret.
Well, let's say you don't successfully negotiate over licensing terms and the other side continues anyway. When you sue, you will not be awarded damages more than what a reasonable royalty would be. Here, treble damages for willful infringement act as a pressure for actors to accept fair licensing terms. So the point being: you can't really use your patent to force unfair licensing terms because in the end a court will never give you more than a reasonable license would result in.
I am absolutely with you on this. I still think USB is an abomination, and the most modern incarnations only get worse — USB3 being essentially PCIe signaling but messed up because the USB committee got involved. They must ruin everything with their touch.
10/100 ethernet over a different cable and connector type would have worked out pretty nicely.
Same. I really dislike I2C, but it's universal and it's been around for decades, and it's hard to avoid designs without it. I2C keeps causing these additional issues which the article doesn't touch on:
* No way to safely bring the bus back to idle from mid-transaction. By "safely" I mean not accidentally transmit an extra byte which could e.g overwrite EEPROM memory. There is no combination of transitioning the 2-wire bus from an arbitrary state back to idle which works in the general case. If it's important, you end up adding a dedicated reset wire.
* No safe, universal way to bring the bus from tristate, or low, to pulled-up. There are designs where this ends up being necessary. You end up with a spurious transaction, which may wedge the bus, or having to add a reset wire or buffer.
* The protocol is extremely hostile to devices with non-zero latency response. It's designed as a simple "Address this register and then immediately read out a byte in the next clock cycle". Works great for trivial devices, but for anything more complex it ends up needing a bank of register acting as a "proxy" to access the higher latency side of the chip. At this point I2C is an awesomely bad choice, but people keep doing this, because it's so universal.
> No way to safely bring the bus back to idle from mid-transaction. [...] No safe, universal way to bring the bus from tristate, or low, to pulled-up.
These are great points, and I'll add a note about them in the article. Thanks!
> The protocol is extremely hostile to devices with non-zero latency response. [...]
Technically, this is what clock-stretching is for. In practice, you're right that complex devices implemented proxy registers. I've seen it on DP->MIPI bridges for example.
> No way to safely bring the bus back to idle from mid-transaction.
Why would you want to do that? Not having the ability to do this is part of the contract. If you design your device such that it always completes the transaction, then there should be no problem, unless one of the devices on the bus doesn't play fair but then you have a different problem.
Say you’ve asked an I2C ROM for a block read. After the first byte something, also on the bus, asserts an interrupt via a side band GPIO. I can’t read the something until the block read finishes.
The specific case I was thinking of was the host suffering an incident where it is not possible or practical for its software to know where it left off.
For example, you get a kernel panic, or soft-reset for some reason. When you recover, you now have a bus in an unknown state, possibly mid-transaction, and if you pick the wrong order in which to bring the bus back to idle, you might wedge it or accidentally cause a side-effect (e.g overwrite a byte in an EEPROM).
But doing bus communication from software is generally a bad idea. Best is to use a hardware controller dedicated to the task. Do you have examples for bus protocols that can be run from software?
If you cannot find a buyer who will take a cut of a $50MM valuation, then the company is in fact worthless. Liquidity is no barrier to this — there are plenty of financial instruments available to do this transaction, even if you can't actually transfer the asset itself. Taking on debt, for example.
Yes, it sucks, but forgive me if I don't shed a tear for someone who has to find a way to pay taxes on their $50M of assets. They absolutely do have options which aren't terrible.
If a "wealth tax" did pass, then expect countless startups who specialize in handling the arbitrage of this.
Uber's defense fails The Duck Test. They are describing a job, people doing a job, people paying for a job, and people taking a cut of the profits. They just don't use those words.
I suspect if/when this gets to a higher court, the whole thing will come crashing down, because to allow Uber's weaselly redefinition of common terms, would be to allow other classes of employment to similarly become unprotected.
I totally agree. I'm neutral on Uber, but their advertising is that you book an Uber ride. You don't use Uber to find a driver you like and then hire that driver from now on. Basically, the drivers are treated as the fungible part of providing service to the passengers. Contrast with Airbnb where owners can treat it like an advertising network to market their rental room, and it's totally reasonable to expect that a good experience will lead to more business for that homeowner specifically, not just the app in general.
>You don't use Uber to find a driver you like and then hire that driver from now on. Basically, the drivers are treated as the fungible part of providing server to the passengers.
Which is also one of the reasons that Uber became successful. A lot of the "Uber for..." companies that provided more personal services like massages or house cleaning failed for this exact reason. As soon as a user found a provider they liked it was easy for the two parties to come to a deal for ongoing service and cut out the tech company. That is how a lead generating company works. Uber doesn't function that way because the provider and the consumer don't have an ongoing relationship because the drivers have all been commoditized.
As a matter of fact I know of one person who met a driver through Uber and decided to hire them daily to get to their job without going through Uber ever again. I think that this is extremely rare and that everything in Uber is set up to prevent something like this. Same thing goes for Airbnb and the obfuscation of emails.
It is rare. The reason Uber and Lyft don’t have the same “work outside the network” problem that Wag / Airbnb does is because when you want a ride you want it now. If you had to wait for your “personal” driver to free up, you’d be waiting... or have to deal with scheduling in advance.
You schedule dog walks and lodging in advance, so it is quite tempting to cut the middle man out once you find what you like. Not so with transportation.
It used to be more common. Back when it was all town cars, and up through the early days of UberX, I frequently got business cards and phone numbers from my drivers.
I think it's actually a violation of the uber TOS for the driver to circumvent the app, and of the passenger not following the community guidelines of Uber, if I understand correctly. Similar to how Wag's new TOS tries to prevent contractors from seeking pet walking outside of the service.
I do feel that driver's being able to work for multiple ride sharing companies at the same time does make it a bit different from a normal job. A majority of drivers have both Lyft and uber enabled at the same time.... so are they employees of both? How should benefits be calculated?
If I am an employee of a company, they are probably not going to let me work for a competitor while I am on the clock with them.
> A majority of drivers have both Lyft and uber enabled at the same time.... so are they employees of both?
Having the app enabled is being on-call for potential assignments, not actually working. In my youngest years, I did that for multiple temp agencies at the same time a lot. Are they employees of both? Sure. Multiple W-2 employers is not that uncommon for people doing temp work.
> How should benefits be calculated?
In most cases, they will probably work little enough for each as to not reach mandatory benefit eligibility under most employer mandates.
> If I am an employee of a company, they are probably not going to let me work for a competitor while I am on the clock with them.
If you are an employee of a company giving on-demand assignments, they probably aren't going to consider you on the clock merely because you have indicated you are available to take an assignment if it becomes available.
If there are minimum paid shift rules in play, they may consider you on the clock and demand exclusivity for the paid period once you accept a job, even if there is a lull between assignments, though.
"Multiple W-2 employers is not that uncommon for people doing temp work."
But not simultaneously. Once I went to a neghborhod where I knew I would not get any Lyft rides (stodgy white folk in suburban San Diego) and took Uber rides specifically to nail bonuses on both platforms.
The new law enshrines the existing case-law test into statute, so if they are properly categorized as contractors under existing state law, then they are also properly categorized as contractors under the new law.
That said, if they were on on-demand W-2 temporary workers instead of contractors, then they’d probably be treated exactly like all such workers (who often are signed up with multiple agencies to receive assignments) are by their employers and not be paid when they were merely willing to receive assignments but only after they had been offered and accepted and were actually working on a particular assignment.
This is somewhat true for higher level jobs, but once you hit retail, and blue collar jobs generally, it stops being true.
McDonalds doesn't care if I also work at Burger King. Target doesn't care if I also work at WalMart. A plumber is generally fine if their assistant also works for another one.
All of this is subject to still doing the first job satisfactorially, of course.
You aren’t “clocked in” in to Target, McDonald’s and Walmart at the same time though. I imagine many of these drivers are marked “available” on lyft, Uber and probably some delivery stuff all at once.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if legislation required them all to open Go their API’s so drivers could use some “app to rule them all” that talks to lyft, Uber and more and helps them choose the best assignments....
At the moment, rideshare drivers don't get paid for being available, so the analogy to being "clocked in" at a regular job falls down.
This is how the rideshare companies claim an absurdly high hourly rate for driving — you only get that rate while actually giving rides and it is generally infeasible to be giving rides all the time. The effective hourly rate is much lower.
The question isn’t whether they’re doing a job, it’s whether drivers are acting as contractors vs employees while performing the job.
Ironically, taxi drivers are also contractors. I’m surprised nobody has brought up the fact that the status quo pre-Uber was a contractor model as well.
The real problem is that the Dynamex decision is legislation from the bench that redefines “contractor.” The historical definition of a contractor was basically only c in the abc test. It will be interesting to see how the court decisions come down. As the press release points out, the precedent so far is mixed.
Just dropping in to say that “legislation from the bench” is a charged, shallow criticism that says nothing except about the critic’s own political philosophy. The fact is, courts have been legislating from the bench for as long as we have had courts, and before then — the U.S. inherited its judicial traditions from England, after all. California is a common law jurisdiction. The essence of common law is that courts create law in the course of issuing their holdings.
Without going down the rabbit hole of Constitutional Law, I’ll just point out that there are folks on the Federal Supreme Court that disagree, in principle, that courts should be making laws.
That aside, if you think it’s a shallow criticism in this case, why do you think it required legislative action to have any effect? In other words, if this wasn’t legislation from the bench, ab5 is a noop.
I’m well aware that there are Supreme Court justices who claim to believe that courts should not make law. And yet... they continue to make law every time they contribute to a majority opinion.
As to AB5, I’m not really educated on the particulars of Dynamex or the political process around AB5 to opine on why it’s been codified. There are many possible reasons, ranging from a desire to try to freeze the law in place, to, as you say a “noop.” This, too, is just a part of the system.
Isn't being a driver on Uber platform same as being a seller on Amazon marketplace? Amazon takes care of delivery, cancellation etc and charges a commission for those services.
I have no idea about this guy, but in my experience, people like this always seem to be pleasant, creative types on the outside. Every now and then in conversation they hold weird viewpoints you just can't reconcile with their projected image, and wonder if you've misjudged them.
They usually turn out to have an underlying wonky or absent moral compass, and abusive personality traits.
The outward image is a confidence trick, and that's how they got where they are.
Even with end to end at some point the information needs to be displayed to the user and especially on Android at that point you can collect anything you'd like. Unless there is some way of encrypting data all the way to the display controller I don't know about. But that will never happen as it would be the end of so many other features.
So he's right theres no such thing as true end to end on common cell phones.
I most certainly do. CarrierIQ (former name) negates it. HTTPS and GPG can't hide anything from it. Any phone app will be entirely transparent. There are other debug apps embeded in different phones that can be triggered to start gathering data in the background. They can even tell the velocity you swiped in what direction and what angle you were holding the phone.
This article is actually describing how the Raspberry Pi 4 does NOT need a fan.
This is not the 1990s. It is perfectly acceptable and even advantageous to design for a high peak:normal load ratio, with thermal throttling. In this case, it allows for a compact, cheap, fanless design for the vast majority of users.
There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan. It is common for the components picked out in particular (power supply, USB-C controllers) to be deliberately designed to run hot. They aren't made on the same process as the SoC.
I feel like there is a missing piece of the software/hardware design art here. There are many takes like this on the Raspberry Pi 4 design. Why only one ethernet? Why no fan? Why not more USB-C? Because it's $35 and because, perhaps, you aren't the target majority market. It's going to satisfy the vast majority of people, and those it doesn't have very simple and cheap ways to mod it so it does.
I'll respectfully disagree. Running my Pi 4 with no fan/heatsink reduces performance to an absolute crawl. It's on par with the desktop on the original Pi released in 2012, i.e. nigh unusable for anything beyond saying "yep, it boots to desktop". Thermal throttling effectively neuters the device.
I have it in an open-air acrylic "sandwich" style case now, with the same Pi-Fan as the author, and it feels performant enough to use as a daily driver for web browsing and other light duties (basically on par with any Chromebook I've come across the past few years). It's still not "desktop replacement" level due to the SD card performance hit, but it's finally good enough for its intended use case in education without being frustrating. Once boot-from-USB3 arrives it will likely be fast enough to use as a second Linux workstation in a serious capacity.
The parent was claiming the Pi was designed with thermal throttling in mind so that no cooling solution was needed. I disagree based on my experience (I’ve owned at least one of every model B Pi since launch as well as three revisions of the Zero).
The assumption implied here is that the Raspberry Pi should deliver continuous peak performance equal to its burst performance.
If the RPi4 specs indicated a peak performance of 10% of burst performance, adding a fan would be a material alteration of the published thermal envelope of the purchased RPi4.
Was this performance characteristic clearly indicated at time of sale?
If so, then the article title, and the assumption above, is wrong: RPi4 does not need a fan, as long as it adheres to the published burst and continuous specs. Clearly there’s room in the thermal envelope for improved continuous performance with a fan, but that in no way is a “need” if they are transparent about this spec.
If not, then they are in good company with Apple and other compact hardware manufacturers in failing to publish their thermal envelope burst/continuous details in clear specifics. If they comply enough to say “min speed / burst speed” then they comply with what modern users generally expect in marketing documentation.
Does the RPi community wish further detail to be included at time of sale regarding thermal envelope behavior and timings at room temperature using the passive cooling case provided? If so, that’s a fair request to make of RPi and one they can easily comply with.
I am not directly the target market, no. And the throttling itself is an indication that the heat was designed/accounted for in the Pi's design.
However, to say that the majority of users don't need better cooling, and it won't cause problems most of the time, seems inaccurate. If you use a microSD card to boot/run the Pi, how many of them are rated for blisteringly-hot operating conditions 24x7 (many people using the Pi as a computer will have it booted pretty much all day and just turn off the monitor, or go to screensaver).
And I have already had one PoE HAT's PoE socket pop partly off the board when removing it from a Pi 3 B+. Partly due to stress of flexing the board, definitely... but that kind of tiny solder joint on a part that is stressed when making a connection is exactly the point of failure that may not be directly caused by, but is definitely not helped by thermal stress.
> There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan.
I have to nitpick at this a little bit as a professional EE who works in high-reliability electronics. Wearout rates absolutely do depend on temperature (and thus heat), and thus the chips used here will have a shorter lifetime than those with active cooling. Now, whether that lifetime will be long enough for the common user is another question (maybe it's 1 million hours of life that get reduced to 100,000 hours, so not normally noticable).
If the pi is designed to throttle at a temperature where its lifespan is reduced from 50 to 49 years, then it is throttling at a gratuitously low temperature that affects quite a few use cases.
On the other hand, if it is designed to throttle at a temperature that materially reduces the lifespan, then it needs a fan to preserve its lifespan.
Either way, the hardware is starkly suboptimal for a pretty large set of advertised use cases until you add a fan.
> If the pi is designed to throttle at a temperature where its lifespan is reduced from 50 to 49 years, then it is throttling at a gratuitously low temperature that affects quite a few use cases.
That's another claim that needs evidence. It seems possible to me that the thermal throttling is designed to prevent logic errors.
To add to this, I wonder if a properly designed case could create a chimney effect (not unlike the crossdraft kiln Primitive Tech made in his most recent video) where escape heat is drawing in cooler air in such a fashion as to be adequate enough fo the vast majority of applications.
Not that fans need to be very loud, or even spin very fast for something of this size, I imagine relatively low RPMs (probably sub 100 RPM) could still achieve considerable cooling, especially with a crossdraft optimized case.
This is why I suggest in the video to just stick some ventilation holes in the top cover. Instead of the heat pooling in that area, it could escape, and there would be some natural convection—in through the gaps around the ports, out through the top. It wouldn't be as good as a fan, but definitely better than slapping a heat sink inside the case.
My plan was to just use a Dremel to notch some holes in the top of the case I ordered a kit with... I just ordered another case that has a fan and will try that... the new one will probably take over retro-gaming chores and I'll find something else for my 3B+ to do.
The case has small rubber feet on one side and the case is slightly dome shaped on the other, I think people will be able to place it correctly without an explicit instruction, plus there is only one “right way” to place it as it is already.
It would work for most people, wouldn't it? And the people putting their raspis into unusual scenarios for which the case was poorly suited could simply choose to not use that particular case. Encouraging thermal convection (ideally flowing over a proper finned passive heatsink) with a chimney design seems like a pretty good idea to me.
I am one of those people, and I do this whenever people want more performance, connectivity or anything else that the PI 3 or PI 4 doesn't have. Then in my view a logical alternative is to man up and pay the reasonable price for an Intel NUC to achieve the solution one is looking for.
It might be misleading, but it's not uncommon. Apple MacBook Pros have thermal throttled at high loads for the past several years. It has throttled for so long that reviewers were surprised that the latest version seems to be using a decent thermal paste and throttles much less.
So if Apple got away with it for years on computers that mostly sold for over $2k, then I think the RPi foundation will probably get away with it on a $35 board.
If Apple can get away with it then the RPi will also get away with it, but it is still a highly deceptive and fraudulent practice.
I spent $2000 on a XPS 15 and peripherals two years ago; if I had known about the thermal throttling I would not have purchased it. Dell literally robbed me of a thousand dollars - had I known that all the 'ultrabook'-style laptops had throttling issues, I would have bought a cheaper and sturdier and higher-specced gaming laptop which beats the XPS in every category except battery life and Thunderbolt. Instead, I spent more and got a substantially worse product.
Collectively laptop manufacturers have defrauded people to the tune of hundreds of millions (even billions?) of dollars. That's not OK.
All portable laptops throttle. What we are vaguely talking about is a firmware bug in the 2018 MacBook Pro i9 that was patched within the first week of release.
It's only a problem if throttling takes them below the advertised base clock under normal conditions. There is absolutely nothing deceptive about this.
A gaming laptop is not really a laptop at all by comparison. They still get less than 4 hours of battery life under load, they're an inch or more thick, they're heavy. Many of them do not fit in backpacks. Gaming laptops are essentially designed for plugged in operation.
I'm a little confused at what's "sturdier" about a gaming laptop as well. Did you break your XPS 15 physically? Gaming laptops have tons of flex and plastic-ness, see MSI.
What benchmark did Dell promise you exactly? Dell didn't rob you of anything. Your own unrealistic expectations did.
> It's only a problem if throttling takes them below the advertised base clock under normal conditions.
Seems like a bit of a contradiction?
Dell said that my laptop would have an i7-7700HQ at 2.8 GHz + turbo to 3.something, and a GTX 1050m.
The laptop Dell sent me behaved like this under load: it goes to the max turbo speed, overheats within a few seconds to a minute, and then throttles to 800 MHz.
It's like if someone advertised a car as having a 280 HP engine, but the engine controller limited it to 100 HP because it had an inadequate cooling system and would overheat at any more load. It is deceptive.
With the laptop, underclocking can fix the CPU throttling - mine can now sustain the max turbo speed forever at 70 degrees. But that's like buying the 100 HP car and modding it to get to 280 - you were sold a faulty product. In the case of the laptop it's fixable in software so that's not as big of a deal, but how many normal people do you think would be willing to mess with their CPU voltages? Or even be aware of the throttling?
Even after underclocking the CPU, I cannot use it at the same time as the discrete graphics card. If I do, the combined heat makes the CPU once again go to 800 MHZ.
Expecting to be able to use the hardware my computer was advertised as having is not having unrealistic expectations.
> I'm a little confused at what's "sturdier" about a gaming laptop as well.
In my experience most gaming laptops are made of metal or thick plastic and seem more durable. I actually had a MSI laptop, it was a tank - like the revered Thinkpads, but better. Dropped it from a few feet and it only got a scratch on the surface.
> A gaming laptop is not really a laptop at all by comparison. They still get less than 4 hours of battery life under load, they're an inch or more thick, they're heavy. Many of them do not fit in backpacks. Gaming laptops are essentially designed for plugged in operation.
That's why I got the XPS 15. Had I known that its performance was a fraction of what was advertised I would have ignored this whole category of deceptive laptops and bought a gaming laptop, even though they have all these downsides.
Whereas I am aware of thermal throttling issues across most thin-and-light laptops, and kept that in mind when purchasing it. I was not defrauded. Perhaps though, I'm more sensitive to it, as I used to write my own throttling scripts for my weird AMD APU "netbook" years ago.
Just to clarify here, all laptops of reasonably small size throttle. Throttling below base clock is the only problem, and it was only a temporary one that was patched out with new firmware on 2018 MacBook Pros.
That's basically modern CPUs for the modern consumer. Laptops often have cooling that can't keep up, same with intel NUCs. Same even with ryzens with integrated video cards. There are bios setting for relaxed thermal throttling that let it get hotter that are a huge boost to performance.
Did you actually try to run the Pi as a desktop replacement? That is what they are advertising. A desktop replacement that is useable for a couple of minutes and then throttles is not something you want.
Without meaning to sound patronising, I believe I understand your confusion. Allow me to explain.
My comment is making an entirely uncontroversial statement: that "backpropagation is an AI algorithm". Not that "backpropagation is AI". The latter could be taken to mean that backpropagation is itself artificially intelligent, that it exhibits some kind of intelligence (leaving aside for the moment the fact that we have no agreed upon definition of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise). If I understand your comment correctly, this is the interpretation you make of my comment.
However, what my comment says, and this should be clear from the context ("most researchers will agree"), is that backpropagation is an algorithm from the field of research that is known as AI.
In that context, "AI", "Artificial Intelligence", is the field of research that investigates methods to construct "AI", "Artificial Intelligence(s)". Backpropagation is a component of one such method, neural networks.
I think then that the confusion, which is also discussed, and exhibited, in the article, stems from the fact that the same word is used to describe both "artificial intelligence" and the field that researches artificial intelligence.
This is not serious : back-propogation is the origin point of modern AI. This is the algorithm that powers the deep network revoultion. It's not the end point, it's not a magic box, but it is fundamentally an AI algorithm.
Just saying "no it isn't" is just not helpful or useful.
You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless.
I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.
People have often believed some narrow tasks require general AI (AGI), however it turns out that almost any specific task can be solved without building an AGI first. This does not change the meaning of "AGI" - a system that is able to perform any mental task as well as an average human.
There are no accepted definitions of these terms. Are they meaningless?
AI that does not include backpropagation or logical deduction or GA's or optimisation is... is... magical thinking. AI without the nuts and bolts from the last 50 years of work is meaningless. The article is heartfelt, and we all agree with the tenant that people pretending that they are using AI when they are really using a database isn't a good thing, but if you take any current system look right down inside it all you will find is a Shannon type implementation of church-turing.
There are tonnes of other approaches to machine learning that don't involve backprop! There are also other approaches to neural netwroks that don't use backprop (have a look at Numenta's stuff for example). I suggest you watch Pat Winston's brilliant MIT AI lectures to see how huge the range of techniques is.
The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.
I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.